Audio Report: live in person! On tape!

This is our best show in a long time, even leaving aside that it’s our only show in a long time. It’s our best show in longer than that. Chris talks about changes in cross-over gaming, we all talk about licensed games, and Allan hits us with the awesome power of a fully operational… well, I’ll let you find out. Check it. (We took January off, so we are actually almost caught up! Keep an eye out for our February 8 show soon.)

On the subject of “designing toward” a property, and non-gamers picking up books as guide-book style products for properties they like, I think that highlights one of the strengths of the original WEG Star Wars – at the time, Star Wars was a beloved franchise, but one that wasn’t activer per se – there weren’t a lot of Star Wars products out there at the time, and the universe was relatively untrod save for the original trilogy of films. Those WEG books were (almost) the only place to find out more about Star Wars. These days, if what I want is *not* a Serenity RPG, I can buy a million “Official Guide to Serenity” books or whatever – these days you have to go all Burning Empires and give those non-gamers “additional value” in the form of “oh, and it’s a game too”.

This show was of course posted 2 months after it was recorded. I have developed some different thought son the subject myself since then. I also have a decent amount of guilt for the Sovereign Press bashing in this show. I think I am understanding where they are coming from a little better then when we taped this…I still have some amount of doubt as to whether I would want to play their version of BSG, but then again I would be saying the same thing if it were WoTC, White Wolf, etc. doing it…

actually, i sorta feel that drive thru/rpgnow arre sorta low rent web pages. I know it shouldn’t make a difference, but their web pages sorta left me cold. Maybe if they produce a new mega page with this merger, that might be better.

They’ve vendors, though, not publishers. You aren’t buying DriveThru’s gaming products, you’re buying from White Wolf, or FanPro, or Ronin Arts, or Lumpley Games or whoever else — the quality of the product depends entirely on the publishers, not the store you’re buying it from.

I still don’t quite get the OgreCave PDF hate; it seems to be “We’re not interested in some types of PDF products, so let’s just diss on them in general” even though a great number of the indie products that they love are also available in PDF — I’m not seeing any hate being directed at Vincent Baker for selling DITV in PDF. It’s just a delivery/presentation method — poor games are going to be released in PDF, and poor games are going to be released in print. DIY publishers used to print off 50 copies of a game at the local copy shop, now they publish it in PDF and via LuLu. The only real difference between now and then is the magic of the internet and the ability to learn about these games without having to be in the same geographical area as the DIY publishers.

The argument that the PDF market has a lower barrier to entry so somehow it’s lesser is quite silly; they are producing a DIFFERENT product, so of course the barrier to entry is lower, just like it’s cheaper to publish a RPG than it is to build a MMORPG.

Please, elaborate — how can the PDF market “be where it needs to be” as you say that it is not?

Also, pretty sure that the way you phrased the GoO/George Martin situation was more inflammatory than GoO ever stated it … taking so long to get A Game of Thrones out certainly hurt GoO, but they [ah, it feels good to no longer reflexively type 'we'] had problems beyond that, and to the best of my recollection George was pretty awesome to the company, at least until the money never rolled in, and then he had good reason to not be awesome. I think further discussion on this topic requires a Red Bull and Vodka, though.

Since we have a license with the Powerstorm card game I can tell you that licenses are expensive and difficult to negotiate unless you have deep pockets or great persistence. Also guarantees can tag your finances at the worst possible times.

I think that smaller licenses are worth the cost if you are primarily leveraging them for artwork and seconarily for the actual “built in market”. Only huge licenses have enough crossover in the hobby game market to really be worth the exceptional cost of a license if your goal is to have a built in market, since a hobby game is really targeted at a fairly small percentage of the total marketplace that a license would nominally appeal to were it a t-shirt or DVD instead of a CCG, RPG, or board game.

Re: gaming podcasts effects, although your interview with me at Gencon never saw the light of day, one thing I said there was that listening to Ogre Cave helped to shape our marketing campaign and product delivery. I think that you guys are insightful and it’s great listening to both gaming enthusiasts and a game retailer to get a perspective on what to do and not to do.

Powerstorm is coming off the boat from Hong Kong in a couple of days (we had delays with the printer and other third party sources). Wish us luck. Chris, I’ll probably bug you to chime in when I start a GIN thread on our game to give folks your experience with our demo.

Ok, i own what may be one of the best small press games ever, kill communist bastard (second edition). So I’m not afraid to give someone a chance, or buy small press games.
i think my main trouble is what my mom told me “never give anyone money unless they have a product (or give you something in return)”. A pdf isn’t really a solid holdin my hands game, it’s a “mysterious electronical acrobat interface” game, i can’t handel that. Sure i could print it out…but that’s like doing all the work myself, might as well play “what if”.

I guess i’m jsut old fashioned in some ways. I like my games in tangable form with art. I sufferd palladium and cyberpunks 2020 (second edition), so bad art and brojken games are someting i’m use to.

Even the low cost of pdf’s sorta aanoys me, I don’t mind paying for someones work.

Awwww, what BS. C’mon, man– so an mp3 of an album or a single isn’t actually a song you can purchase on itunes? What you’re really saying is that you dislike the format enough that you can’t justify paying money for them. That doesn’t mean it’s not a product.

I really think at some point we should drop this whole thing and agree to disagree. I like the physical nature of a published product. I can bring it into the toilet or the bathtub without anyone looking too funny at me. I also get pretty severe eyestrain when reading PDFs. That’s me, not you…so we all have various reasons for liking or not liking things. My involve potty issues.

Lee, as for your Interview, I got nothing. Have to pass that on up the chain to the Sugarbaker boys. I am just “talent.” (I also use that term VERY loosely).

As for the recording quality, that was way my bad. The studio was not set up properly. I caught it after the fact. Maybe in a year we can do it again ;).

Chris sez: I really think at some point we should drop this whole thing and agree to disagree.

Chris, out of the three on the show, I would regard you as the one least likely to say oddly unjustified things about PDF publishing, and the most likely to understand and sanely express your opinions about the current scope and potential of the market.

Tim sez: I guess i’m jsut old fashioned in some ways. I like my games in tangable form with art. I sufferd palladium and cyberpunks 2020 (second edition), so bad art and brojken games are someting i’m use to.

Even the low cost of pdf’s sorta aanoys me, I don’t mind paying for someones work.

Both the amount/quality of art and the price of PDFs are, again, up to the publisher. I can understand preferring print to PDF, but the art/price criticism is publisher-related, not format-related.